Māori board game already 'sold out'

A new Māori language board game has been created to encourage Te Reo usage and help people strengthen their language skills.

Radio NZ reports the board game, called "Kuputupu", was created by Taitā librarian Peggy McConnell and others at the centre to help people learn and practice Te Reo.

The game works similarly to scrabble where players are given a selection of tiles and gain points based upon the words they can create.

"It's all about sharing Te Reo and making it accessible," Ms McConnell told Radio NZ.

"Not all of us here have much knowledge of the Māori language but when you play the game, people don't realise how much Te Reo knowledge they actually have."

The game was piloted in 2017 as part of a Wellington-wide library festival that celebrated different ways of storytelling.

After showing the game to the Lower Hutt divisional manager Ms McConnell's group was given the chance to make 100 copies of the game.

Ms McConnell says the building of the games was a real community effort, the new tiles made of rimu each came with paper on them that needed to be removed, a task performed by the children who visited the library each day.

"We also had kids loading the tiles into the laser printers and printing the letters onto the tiles, and printing the macron tiles," Ms McConnell said.

The first 100 copies of the game have already sold out, but the library will be continuing to make the games in 2018.